ABDIEL "KELVIN" IZAR | D11

They couldn't bury Gabriel where he deserved. A hero, Kirito's emissaries had said, deserves to be buried with compatriots. And so that morning, they trekked the four miles to the cemetery on foot as a casket was paraded through the district, his hands trembling in a suit-jacket a size too large. As the country celebrated the life of a girl from the mines, he stood hand in hands, watching a casket being lowered into the ground: clinical, sterile, as if all the boy had done was pass in his sleep.

In the open air, the sun casting beads of sweat down his forehead, fourteen-year-old Abdiel thinks. At the very least, they should have laid him next to Raquel and Salome, Levi or Benat - Iago, even. Not here, next to WOODS, MERCY and an empty plot. It was for "easy access", the escort, currently shedding crocodile tears, had mentioned with a wave of their hand. For whose access? he had wondered.

Three days ago he had told the cows, whispered gently. He had told the trees, standing on tiptoes with his neck craned upwards. He had told the spiders nestled in corners, the bees whose wax he had dutifully collected para tejer el camino al cielo.

"Gabriel está muerto." A pause.
"No, fue asesinado."

The boy, dark from the sun, gaunt from watching a slow-burning execution, knows that nobody will be visiting the grave of an Izar unless they are an Izar. And so, he reasons, it is for the exact opposite reason that his brother lies here: a flatland filled with pristine stones, everything that he wasn't.

That night, after the extended family has held their hands and gone to bed upstairs, downstairs, crashed on couches and armchairs, his parents walk with him for six miles, on a pathway that winds through hills untouched. When they arrive, they shake out the remaining cloth and drape it over the stone, flicker the beeswax to life. And they sit, a vigil that lasts for hours, until the wax finally disappears with the last tendrils of smoke. Somehow, even though the chill of a nighttime breeze makes his bones ache, he feels a touch warmer.

A month later, his work begins. It's in poor taste, the neighbors say, as they spy him walking to the small building at the edge of the district. But he doesn't respond - they don't deserve an explanation. Inside, his eyes - hazel, tired but steady - focus on the preparations as Imelda speaks to the family and fills out the paperwork: a delicate shave, a gentle wrapping in a shroud, a gentle nod when her granddaughter requests to help. He tries to help stitch up the edges of grief, smooth out the wrinkles in the plan. He travels with Imelda as she consults patients in makeshift hospice rooms, stands with an umbrella as the skies begin to rain down.

He still doesn't know what to say, how to say, what he wants to express to them. "Just do your job," Imelda responds in return. "That's all they wish". And so he stays silent, clinical as he sits with a yellowed binder of burial options. Paperwork is done quickly, precisely, because anything else will just cause distress.

Perhaps this is why they've begun to call him Kelvin - cold, reserved, with "absolutely zero reaction" to seeing those passed on. And they're wrong, of course; there's days where he needs to take time alone, wracked with mourning, or horror, or compassion. But that's not what they hired him to do. Yet as bubbly as he can be when with his family, in the warmth of a home filled with song and dance, it's always muted ever so slightly.

The first week after Gabriel died, they hung cloth over the mirrors and his mother opened a window. But Abdiel kept his shut; if there was a soul trapped, it should be in a home filled with familiar faces. He wonders now whether he should have opened that window. But he knows, he calculates, that it wouldn't change mauve to ultraviolet.